Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Living in an Era of Decline

By Alan Caruba

Most of us know whether we are living in
good times or bad. Some of us warn of decline when we see it coming. Some choose
to ignore it by distracting themselves. The latter assume they cannot change
events, but in a democracy where you get to vote for who represents you, we are
all participants in one fashion or other, whether we vote or
not.

If Hillary Clinton is elected
President in 2016, historians and those who have lived through the first twenty
years of this new century will see this score of years as one that began with
much hope and descended rapidly into an expanding Islamic war on the world, seen
most dramatically on 9/11 and followed by a financial disaster in 2008 that was
widely predicted as the government pressured banks to make bad mortgage loans.
It is doing that again.

Dramatically, too, in 2008
Americans—constantly told how racist we are—voted for the nation’s first black
President, Barack Hussein Obama, even though little was known of him.
Significantly, too, the voters rejected Hillary Clinton, thought to be the
“inevitable” choice as the first woman President. Neither race, nor sex, is a
predicate for being the leader of the free world. Experience, knowledge, and
moral integrity is.

There is something tragic when a
political party is able to offer only the past as their idea of the future.
President Obama is already widely seen to have been a failure, presiding for six
years while the nation’s debt soared to $18 trillion and millions remain
unemployed. His foreign policies were administered by Hillary Clinton in his
first term and her idea of what to do with nations that are our enemies is to
“emphasize” with them and even “respect” our differences with them.

The most recent examples have been the
negotiations with an Iran determined to have nuclear weapons and opening the
door to diplomatic recognition of Cuba, a Communist dictatorship ninety miles
from Florida.

What has been cited is a definition of
national decline. As we close in on the 2016 elections, we are also at risk of
having begun the new century from a position of leadership and strength we may
not be able to achieve again due to our debt and the failure of a vision for a
better future. While we have been living through these years, we have also
understandably been paying greater attention to our own individual
lives.

As a member of the senior generation,
I and my cohorts have watched America decline from the most powerful nation on
Earth, a leader for freedom, a stalwart opponent of the Soviet Union and
Communism, to one led by a pathetic apologist who never passes on an opportunity
to criticize America and emphasize its failure to live up to its ideals. We’re
not perfect, but we still provide justice and opportunity as no other nation on
Earth.

The generations behind us such as the
“boomers” who arrived after World War II, enjoyed much of the best America has
had to offer, but in the 1960s tended toward the growth of the drug culture and
unwittingly experienced the decline in education standards that has left later
generations devoid of knowledge about our founding principles and early
struggles. More than twice their parents and grandparents engaged in wars far
from home to thwart totalitarian regimes.

In the 1970s America saw the growth of
the environmental movement which, by the late 1980s, was regaling everyone with
doomsday predictions about a “global warming” that never occurred. What did
occur was a government agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, that is
threatening to cause a massive loss of the electrical and other sources of
energy on which the nation—you and I—depend. Electricity may seem magical, but
it requires years and years of planning and construction to ensure it is
available when we flip the light switch. The EPA is quite literally an enemy
comparable to one with an invading army.

So all of us, young and old, have
arrived at the tail end of the first twenty years of the new century in a very
different America than took on the challenge of the twentieth century and turned
it into one of innovation and achievement.

That is critical to the choices
Americans must make because the 2016 elections can either take us backward to
past times—the 1990s—or forward to face the great challenges of our present and
future times. We had financial success along the way, but we also had a massive
financial failure in 2008 that originated earlier thanks to progressive ideas
about home ownership. In 2001 we responded to the worst homeland attack since
Pearl Harbor in the 1940s, fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not
grasping the full scope of the Islamic threat.

The progressive ideas of the current
administration that the presumptive candidate of the Democratic Party will
emphasize will allege inequities and inequalities between the Middle Class and
those they call the “one percent” of the wealthy. Despite the fact that the
wealthy are the source of millions in campaign funds, they will publicly scorn
them as “Wall Street” and the “Big Banks.”This is very much in keeping with the Progressive demonization of “Big
Oil”. “Big Coal” and other alleged enemies of the nation.

These major elements of our economy
are all in fact enemies of unemployment, providing thousands of jobs with good
pay, and enemies of decline, providing the energy America needs to exist and
grow.

The most disquieting aspect of the
months ahead will be the role of the mainstream media that, with a few
exceptions, will be the megaphone for failed progressive ideas, policies and
programs. They will suffer a forgetfulness of the many scandals that have led to
Hillary Clinton’s present bid to be the next President.

We are living in an era of decline
that must be rejected and turned around with the “old fashioned” virtues of a
marketplace economy free of a tax code no one can comprehend, environmental
policies that slow and kill development, a federal government grown too large to
do anything well—remember the introduction of ObamaCare and the fact that it has
driven up insurance costs, not reduced them?

All of us of voting age have a heavy
responsibility to know and understand the times in which we live and to make
wise choices or know we shall be living in an era of failure for the nation we
love.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.